Why is the Text to HTML Ratio Important for SEO

Writing quality, useful and unique content is the most important thing which you should do it regularly to increase visitors’ pleased and engagement with your site. But at the same time, you should know that visitors’ look is different than a search engine because crawlers are bots, not humans and you should make both satisfied to get more regular traffic.

What is the Text to HTML Ratio?

Text to HTML Ratio (also known as Code to Text Ratio) is the percentage to measure the text amount to code size on the same page OR how much readable actual plain text you have on your page?.
Writing relevant content on your site will help search engine crawler bots to rank you higher and show your pages to more visitors. As we all know, Google started in 2011 with the Panda update to lower the rank of low-quality sites and thin content sites because they weren’t useful to anyone.
Ideally, an HTML ratio should be of 25 to 70 percent, which indicates the visible text is good enough to know what is your page about. But it doesn’t mean you have to add useless content just by increasing Text to HTML Ratio, 15% is also considered a good ratio.

Hint: When Text to HTML Ratio goes beyond 70%, your site might run the risk of being considered spam.

How To Determine Text to HTML Ratio For Your Site?

Text to HTML Ratio is calculated by dividing the text amount on page’s code size. You can use any online checking ratio tools to easily find your Text to HTML Ratio and check if it needs to be improved or not.
These ratio tools extracts the text from paragraphs and the anchor text from HTML code, and calculates the content ratio based on this information.

How to Reduce Your Page code Size to increase the Text to HTML Ratio?

Its very important to improve your page’s code and remove any unwanted and unnecessary codes to get smaller HTML page for faster loading and better rank. Here is the 10 top best ways to Reduce HTML Size:

1. Page size: Keep the size of your page under 300kb.
2. Anchors is Better: Use anchor text instead of absolute URLs.
3. Validate HTML: Check if your pages has errors by any W3C Validation Service.
4. Flash Elements: Don’t use javascript files and flash objects until its very necessary.
5. Remove Unwanted Codes: any unnecessary code, plugin and javascript has to be removed.
6. Minify Everything: Compress all blocking resources such as CSS and JavaScript as well as main HTML.
7. White Spaces: Huge white spaces is considered as code area, so you have to remove it by minify HTML page.
8. Avoid Hidden Text: Don’t hide your txt by give it font size zero and same color as background or including text behind images.
9. Defer Javascript: Place all javascript files at the footer area (just before the closing body tag) not at above-the-fold.
10. Don’t inline Large CSS Files: We already know that inline small CSS files in the head of HTML is a great way to improve your page speed because its reduce RTT (Round Trip Time) and minimize HTTP Requests, but inline large CSS is a very bad idea because its increase your HTML page size and give a signal to search engine that you don’t have enough content.

Is the Text to HTML Ratio an Important for SEO?

You shouldn’t worry about text to HTML ratio, focus on your user’s needs and what is best for them, how to make incredible posts, how to make them surprised by the useful information you provided, and how to satisfy search engines with your top quality content.
Any SEO expert will tell you that, the best practice for better SEO is having more text compared to HTML on your site. But instead of adding useless content for such a purpose, try to enhance your HTML and improve its code to easily read and accessed by bots. Writing content for people rather than search engines to give your visitors a better understanding of your page idea, is the top first place that all webmasters follow now because that’s what Google needs from you.

Is the Text to HTML Ratio a Ranking Factor?

The simple answer is, NO.
Google doesn’t calculate your site that way, there are more than 200 factors that determine your page rank and i am pretty sure Text to HTML Ratio is not one of them.
But there are many important ranking factors depend on Code to HTML Ratio like page loading time, relevancy content, user experience, crawling and indexing.
Also, having a higher code to text ratio than your competitors gives you a good chance for better on-site optimization and higher page ranking in the SERPs.

Text to HTML Ratio Best Practices

• As long as the ‪‬‬content is relevant and gives essential information, it is a great to have more of it.
• Your page must always have some amount of plain text including easily readable text with quality user information.
• If you have a low Text to HTML Ratio you should consider improving your html structure or just add more useful content to your site.
• Don’t bother your visitors by having huge space with scrolling for just getting higher Text to HTML Ratio, if your content is not relevancy then you are wasting your time and pushing your site to the darkest place in search engine results.